Money Supermarket 'Bears'
Another hilarious proposition in which a gang of bears chase a man through the jungle.
Sep 04, 2019
3 min read
Director: Matthijs van Heijningen
Agency: Engine/WCRS
Production: MJZ
Client: Money Supermarket
The second instalment of the new MoneySupermarket Campaign, where a bunch of bears enjoy the easy life in the best waterfal in the world.
Bear
During the process, we developed a hyper-realistic bear that was later replicated and added multiple variations to build this population of bears chasing the hero through the forest, something that involved quite a bit of work reconstructing the forest ground to be able to produce proper contact, some CGI plants so our bears could also interact with those and of course, the final shot.
I put a mood board early on for our team of what the Bear should be able to do as the editing was not yet finalised. Of course, we aimed to have a realistic-looking bear behaving realistically, so I based my research on real bears doing real things.
several
And we produced a model with muscles, fat skin and tested it on several conditions to check that things were working fine.
We also tested the look under many lighting conditions to make sure we had a solid asset to use during the production and minimise tweaks.
And of course, during the production, we did a lot of testing with the muscles and animation of the base surface to make sure things were behaving properly.
Across the shot production, we also did a ton of work on the FX to make sure it felt perfectly integrated, as this clip shows you can see the leaves and debris pass.
Jungle
At the same time, we put our energy on the end shot as well, especially since the jungle shot could do with a little bit of grading and extension of the jungle foliage in a more cinematic way, so we did an early paint over the image coming from the camera to make sure things looked like paradise.
I also put together a few references from that same area of the world with the perfect lighting conditions.
After many versions and later full on compositing we finished with this end shot that was assembled to match the client requests.
All in all, our effort in this shot was to make sure the space was readable and extend the background to give it a bit of sky and depth.